On 15 October 2023 Italo Calvino would have turned 100: it is to him that we want to dedicate the 7th edition of the Cose Belle Illustration Contest.
But what is lightness? What does it mean to be light?
In American Lessons, Calvino clarifies that lightness can be "an antidote to the petrification of the world and its opacity", therefore lightness as lightening, agility, simplification, levity. Lightness as a talisman to carry with you every day, to face the inevitable grayness of life.
“In moments when the human realm seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into another space. I'm not talking about escapes into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, I have to look at the world with another perspective, another logic, other methods of knowledge and verification. The images of lightness that I seek must not allow themselves to be dissolved like dreams by the reality of the present and the future.” Lightness, therefore, not as superficiality, but as method, logic, reaction to the weight of living.
Calvino, citing Kundera and his essay "The unsustainable lightness of being", takes the opportunity to clarify that lightness and weight are contrasted like two sides of the same coin: if there were no weight, there would be no lightness; if there were no compulsion, there would be no desire to fly.
Life is therefore a path of which heaviness as well as lightness is part: can being aware of this be saving? In everyone's life, aren't there days in which your soul feels heavy, a boulder on your heart, your breath breaking, and everything seems difficult precisely because you feel the weight? And then there are the bright days, when the soul is light, when you dream and feel butterflies, chills and warmth. Are those who are light-hearted therefore luckier, wiser, or have they perhaps found the key to making the best of every situation?
For us, lightness is the less is more attitude of the soul. Doesn't everything essential in design acquire value? Could it be lightness, the ability to eliminate excesses, negative, unnecessary thoughts, those that make life ugly?
Apuleius was also convinced that "To live, just like to swim, those without burdens are better off, because even in the storm of human life, light things serve to support, heavy things help to sink".
How can lightness be visually narrated?
Come on illustrators, may imagination and emotions be with you. That, in visually interpreting lightness, you can leave a mark in the heart and soul of those who admire your work.
Be light-hearted, we've been trying, always.
